{"id":29185,"date":"2017-12-27T13:20:55","date_gmt":"2017-12-27T18:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29185"},"modified":"2017-12-27T13:20:55","modified_gmt":"2017-12-27T18:20:55","slug":"book-review-food-scarcity-unavoidable-by-2100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29185","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100?<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
\n
<\/a><\/div>\n
This is an excerpt from the review by Ugo Bardi published on the “Journal of Population and Sustainability<\/a>“<\/i><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Scientific studies that examine the food supply and its correlation to human population have a long tradition that goes back to Thomas Malthus and his \u201cAn Essay on the Future of Population\u201c of 1798. From then on, the field has remained politically charged. Still today, Malthus is often dismissed as a doomsday prophet whose apocalyptic predictions turned out to be wrong. But Malthus lacked<\/a> the modern concept of \u201covershoot and collapse\u201d and he never predicted the kind of population crashes that we associate to modern famines.<\/p>\n

Another study often accused of having been overly catastrophistic in terms of the future of the human population is the report to the Club of Rome titled \u201cThe Limits to Growth\u201d, published in its first version in 1972. This is also a misinterpretation, since none of the several scenarios reported in 1972 foresaw a population decline before entering the second half of the 21st century.<\/p>\n

In analogy with the first report to the Club of Rome, the recent book by Weiler and Demuynck, “Food Scarcity”<\/a> approaches an old problem with a new methodology. While \u201cThe Limits to Growth\u201d was one of the first studies to apply system dynamics to the study of the economy, \u201cFood Scarcity\u201d is among the first studies that applies the modern network theory to the world\u2019s food system. The resulting book, \u201cFood Scarcity,\u201d is an ambitious attempt to pack an enormous amount of material into just 150 pages. It starts with a review of the situation of the world\u2019s food supply with extensive data on the different climate systems, cultivation technologies, geographical conditions, and more.<\/p>\n

\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100? This is an excerpt from the review by Ugo Bardi published on the “Journal of Population and Sustainability“ Scientific studies that examine the food supply and its correlation to human population have a long tradition that goes back to Thomas Malthus and his \u201cAn Essay on the Future […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[17676,1760,10777,7777,5354,17677,485,1371,769,2692],"class_list":["post-29185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-17676","tag-book-review","tag-cassandras-legacy","tag-club-of-rome","tag-food-scarcity","tag-journal-of-population-and-sustainability","tag-limits-to-growth","tag-population","tag-sustainability","tag-ugo-bardi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29186,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29185\/revisions\/29186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}